6 ms·

>The economy is rigged such that in the absence of any positive action, workers' purchasing power goes down over time by default. This obviously isn't a problem

>The economy is rigged such that in the absence of any positive action, workers' purchasing power goes down over time by default. This obviously isn't a problem for the rich, whose money is stored almost entirely in assets which by definition rise in value with inflation. Look, I'm sensitive to the struggles of the less well off, and that we are in a particularly rough part of a cycle. I don't believe the economy is at all optimal. But your comment implies that people are getting poorer over time, and it flies in the face of reality, doesn't it? Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates.

Yiin 3y ago
Your comment ignores that "richer" in this context mean basically breadcrumbs in comparison to all the other assets poor people can't realistically invest in. If economy in general goes up 20x and your own wealth increases 1.5x, yeah you got wealthier compared to before, but poorer compared to everything else.
- dgoldstein0 3y ago
  This sounds fine to me if "your own wealth increases 1.5x" means an increase in purchasing power as opposed to the 1.5x being wiped by inflation. E.g. if housing costs quadruple you can't use that extra cash to buy a nicer house/rent a nicer apartment than before, and probably you want to save the extra money as a result of the higher housing costs rather than buying better food (assuming it didn't also rise significantly in price) We like to hand wave and approximate costs via a single "inflation" number but smart phones are infinitely more cheap than 20 years ago - they didn't exist back then - whereas they don't solve basic needs like food & shelter. So we need better metrics. So I have to hand wave a bit but if the economy grows such that everyone has better purchasing power, but the top 5% or 1% benefit 100x more than everyone else, I think that's a win; it'd of course be better if the new wealth was spread closer to equally, but the main thing is to make sure as much as practical that everyone is better off. I'm not actually sure we know what the right economic policies to promote this sort of goal are.
PretzelPirate 3y ago
> Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates. Are you two talking about different time scales? Individuals in the workforce get poorer as their buying power drops, but each generation lives in a wealthier society as more innovation improves life.
- plaguuuuuu 3y ago
  People are demonstrably poorer, medical bankruptcies, the homeless pile up in fetid camps, but everyone has access to multiple lifetimes worth of social media content and fake AI waifus.
oblio 3y ago
Are you talking about a timescale of 100 years or 30? People are poorer than they were in 1990, especially the mid to lower classes.
- milesskorpen 3y ago
  This is not true: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA This is real GDP per capita
  - patmcc 3y ago
    This doesn't address the claim oblio was making - 'People are poorer than they were in 1990, especially the mid to lower classes' - real GDP per capita could double but it all be captured by the top quartile, for example. (I think the claim is still wrong, and that all quartiles are doing better in real terms, but that's a tougher thing to measure)
    - lumost 3y ago
      https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Annual wages are about 15% higher today compared to 1971 in real terms. Real terms is a bit suspect in this case as wage earners are more likely to pay nominal rent then owner equivalent rent. It may well be accurate that the average wage earner is worse off today then they were in 1971. I'd venture a speculation that this is reflected in media, sitcoms of the 70s rarely had roommates - and the 80s/90s poked fun of those who lived in their parents basements. Roommates are relatively common in shows today.
      - fouc 3y ago
        Shared living arrangements have been prevalent long before the 70s, boarding houses and the like. I wouldn't rely on film and television industry to be exactly that representative of the times.
        3y ago
ajkjk 3y ago
Their comment is about the math, which has to be true. There can still be countervailing effects, but the math still works out the way it works out.
- bsdpufferfish 3y ago
  its really not. the math is a distant abstraction of a social subject
kbelder 3y ago
Because there is no absence of any positive action. That's one of the main benefits of the free market.
roenxi 3y ago
> Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates. That is the issue with the absurdities of inflation and interest rates - how do you tell whether we're better off if the yardstick for measuring value is being purpose fully distorted? And the way we measure the distortion seems to be unreliable;I don't see how inflation is supposed to rise faster than wages but asset prices seem to be inflating substantially faster than the inflation rate making it harder to save. GDP also disassociated from energy use in the 1970s so I don't see why it going up means I'm better off either - I need cheap energy to be comfortable. All the stuff GDP measures is nice, but rising energy prices are a massive problem that we don't focus on as much as we did when they were driving GDP growth despite the fact that they are still a major part of existing. Asia is better off in real terms. A friend of mine was talking about how he went home to his ancestral village and they had toilets now which is a massive QoL step change. So if "society" is global, yes. If we're talking English speaking countries, you can tell me I'm better off, but I'm not sure what metrics you're using or why we believe they matter. I have access to much better electronic equipment than my parents, and our ability to cure ailments has improved markedly. But a bunch of people I know had to leave the city because they literally couldn't afford to live here. Debt seems to be out of control. We're seeing political discontent in the UK and US that seems to be linked to people who don't believe that they are becoming better off, and I tend to believe people when they say that. TLDR; maybe. But you're making a claim that is vaguer than you might think. We're a much smarter society than we were 50 years ago, but it is less obvious who it is that is "significantly wealthier" and what that means.
- jrmg 3y ago
  But a bunch of people I know had to leave the city because they literally couldn't afford to live here. Haven’t people always done that though? America’a history is one of constant migration. Searching for general stats on labor mobility, it seems that Americans are moving to find work (surely the same thing as moving because the place they are is unaffordable for the lifestyle they want?) _less_ now: E.g. https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/regional-economics/recent-trends-in-u-s-labor-mobility-not-so-fast https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/regional-economi... In recent decades, as land across the U.S. filled with development—particularly along the coasts—highly mobile cities became increasingly populated by people born there. As an example, in 1960, 20 percent of U.S.-born residents of Los Angeles were from California, while by 2010, 70 percent were. At the same time, population growth rates have converged and are now similar across all regions. Coate and Mangum theorize that these two trends are connected by home attachment, or “rootedness”—that is, people prefer to live near family and social connections.4 Despite individual differences in the intensity of home attachment, the authors find a preference for home among the young and the old, and for both college- and noncollege-educated workers.
harimau777 3y ago
While society has gotten wealthier, have average people, at least in America, gotten wealthier? Technology has advanced so there's things that people can own now that they couldn't before, but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer.
- randomdata 3y ago
  > but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer. If housing were constant then people would not be any poorer with respect to housing. They would be in the exact same position. But housing is not a constant. The average US house has have more than doubled in size over the past 50 years. The average US home also has one less person living in it as compared to 50 years ago. People today are way richer in housing.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    How can people be richer in housing if they can't own a house. That doesn't make sense to me.
    - harryh 3y ago
      Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
      - chipdart 3y ago
        > Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range. I don't think your graph says what you think it says. The graph shows a time series of the rate of homes which are owner-occupied to those that aren't. When the average Joe buys a house, they tend to stick with it for life. However, the graph you linked clearly shows this rate plummeting from 2004 to 2016, with the nosedive amounting to around 6%. This means that in a short span of a decade, the amount of home owners living in their own home dropped 10%. You have a small spike around 2020 which I bet was caused by WFO allowing people to live in places cheap enough that they could finally afford their home, but that stagnated already. Also, it's interesting how such a meteoric drop happens in an indicator that tracks home ownership, which is something people do for life. You need a very radical change in the people's ability to afford a house to see so many people stop affording them in such a quick timespan.
djtango 3y ago
There was this great chart that I wish I could find which kind of explained it well for me. Things we consume have gotten cheaper - flights, electronics. Things related to wealth - assets but also things like education have all gotten more expensive. So we all get to live a more "experiential" life but good luck passing anything on, if you care about those kinds of things... EDIT here we go - similar (if not the same) chart: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/17/the-stuff-we-really-need-is-getting-more-expensive-other-stuff-is-getting-cheaper/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/17/the-s...
datavirtue 3y ago
And inflation is a result of an increasing money supply, which if it were not the case the poor would be absolutely subjugated.
throwawaymaths 3y ago
People are not getting poorer because productivity has been going up to compensate. As in, we're milking more and more out of the labor and middle classes. (Ok also technology papers over the problem as commerce becomes somewhat more efficient) The family is not too much less wealthy but also we have families with two incomes, breadearners working overtime, stressed out family dynamics, and student going into deeper and deeper debt to be credentialed enough to participate in the sophisticated workforce. If you look at the "wtf happened in 1970" chart, the y axes are productivity and real wages. It turns out 2% inflation is enough to steal the productive increase of labor and middle classes and transfer it to the politically connected, wealthy, and financial sectors. At some point it's just going to be impossible to wring more gains out of labor and technology improvements. We're probably really close.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  This was so insightful, thanks.
- may_mccheese 3y ago
  I don't think we're "really close" insofar as I feel that's been side continuously since the 1600s say. Always another thing comes. People say "everyone is richer" because the cost "nice things" generally drops with time due to efficiency. So nobody is in fact financially richer, just richness from a quality of life perspective versus someone living in a cave - it's kind of a cop-out and a twist on words. Indeed the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of the US holds over 95% of the wealth, it's actually completely insane. most people are poor, relatively and comparatively. A common sense wealth / net worth tax, 5% per year for 5 years, 2% per year thereafter, would ameloriate this.
chipdart 3y ago
> But your comment implies that people are getting poorer over time, and it flies in the face of reality, doesn't it? Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates. I think you are confusing two entirely different things. You can have a society that's getting wealthier and still people getting poorer. In fact, you have just that in the real world. It's as simple as seeing how the median salary and average salary compare and evolve. It's as simple as comparing how minimum wages evolved with inflation. It's no coincidence that even in the US, humanity's apex in economic development and wealth, the average Joe cannot afford a house while a few decades back it could.
rmbyrro 3y ago
Considering how difficult it has become (even pre-COVID) for young people to buy a home, your argument flies in the face of reality, doesn't it?
- okr 3y ago
  Buy a home where? In the area of a thriving city? Where everyone wants to live?
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    Anywhere. Young people have to move to thriving cities to get better paying jobs and education for better paying jobs, because they cannot afford homes where they were born with the salaries and opportunities there.
okr 3y ago
I can agree with that. It is like the frog in slowly boiling water, just the other way around, people don't realize and appreciate, in what wealth they live and that we all make it constantly better for everyone, consciously or unconsciously. But people look at other people who are visibly better off, compare themselves against those and get tricked into believing, that it is no just. How he can have more? Must be evil! Stolen from the people! Typical divide and conquer, to play with ego and greed, that causes misery and anger among our fellows. It makes me sad to see the same scheme being played out everytime.
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  If you mean what you say, I'll trade you all my modern conveniences in return for a small patch of land with a house in 1970s standard or 1960s standard. Deal? If offered this, a large majority of young people and people without real estate would gladly accept and happily live without iphones or AC.
  - tasuki 3y ago
    I believe that's what they'd say but they actually wouldn't want to do that. Do you know the size of houses in 1960s and how many people lived in how much space? Today people are priced out of the housing market because everyone expects opulent luxury.
    - carlosjobim 3y ago
      No, that's not true. And I don't think you really believe that yourself either. It's just an easy cop out to not have to think about a very serious issue that is crushing your fellow man right now. It is the home sellers who put "opulent luxury" prices on worn down homes in need of repair. It is the sellers who renovate homes for 100 000 to increase the asking price with 500 000. Imagine if this was the market for cars or any other goods.
      - tasuki 3y ago
        I guess it all depends on where/when and other specifics. The reality is that in the fifties large families used to live packed quite tightly in a small space, and now, they... don't?
derangedHorse 3y ago
What do you mean "Society has become significantly wealthier"? When I think of wealth I think of an individual's assets to liabilities. If we look at the total value of an individual's assets with respect to the labor it can purchase, I don't think society has gotten all that wealthier. Maybe you're conflating quality of life with wealth? Better quality and more abundant goods with decreasing marginalized labor costs is what we should expect since technology is naturally deflationary. If anything, the oddity is that food prices ever increase over time when quality is stagnant. The book "The Price of Tomorrow" does a good job giving a perspective on this. There's also the problem of misguided/fraudulent capital investment which is when governments and corporations raise costs under the guise of technological improvements. This is when they say they add in extra processes for quality when they're really just lining their pockets. Think medical schools and doctors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6288618/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6288618/), the FDA processes(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug...), etc.

Yiin 3y ago

Your comment ignores that "richer" in this context mean basically breadcrumbs in comparison to all the other assets poor people can't realistically invest in. If economy in general goes up 20x and your own wealth increases 1.5x, yeah you got wealthier compared to before, but poorer compared to everything else.

dgoldstein0 3y ago
This sounds fine to me if "your own wealth increases 1.5x" means an increase in purchasing power as opposed to the 1.5x being wiped by inflation. E.g. if housing costs quadruple you can't use that extra cash to buy a nicer house/rent a nicer apartment than before, and probably you want to save the extra money as a result of the higher housing costs rather than buying better food (assuming it didn't also rise significantly in price) We like to hand wave and approximate costs via a single "inflation" number but smart phones are infinitely more cheap than 20 years ago - they didn't exist back then - whereas they don't solve basic needs like food & shelter. So we need better metrics. So I have to hand wave a bit but if the economy grows such that everyone has better purchasing power, but the top 5% or 1% benefit 100x more than everyone else, I think that's a win; it'd of course be better if the new wealth was spread closer to equally, but the main thing is to make sure as much as practical that everyone is better off. I'm not actually sure we know what the right economic policies to promote this sort of goal are.

PretzelPirate 3y ago

> Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates. Are you two talking about different time scales? Individuals in the workforce get poorer as their buying power drops, but each generation lives in a wealthier society as more innovation improves life.

plaguuuuuu 3y ago
People are demonstrably poorer, medical bankruptcies, the homeless pile up in fetid camps, but everyone has access to multiple lifetimes worth of social media content and fake AI waifus.

oblio 3y ago

Are you talking about a timescale of 100 years or 30? People are poorer than they were in 1990, especially the mid to lower classes.

milesskorpen 3y ago
This is not true: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA This is real GDP per capita
- patmcc 3y ago
  This doesn't address the claim oblio was making - 'People are poorer than they were in 1990, especially the mid to lower classes' - real GDP per capita could double but it all be captured by the top quartile, for example. (I think the claim is still wrong, and that all quartiles are doing better in real terms, but that's a tougher thing to measure)
  - lumost 3y ago
    https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Annual wages are about 15% higher today compared to 1971 in real terms. Real terms is a bit suspect in this case as wage earners are more likely to pay nominal rent then owner equivalent rent. It may well be accurate that the average wage earner is worse off today then they were in 1971. I'd venture a speculation that this is reflected in media, sitcoms of the 70s rarely had roommates - and the 80s/90s poked fun of those who lived in their parents basements. Roommates are relatively common in shows today.
    - fouc 3y ago
      Shared living arrangements have been prevalent long before the 70s, boarding houses and the like. I wouldn't rely on film and television industry to be exactly that representative of the times.
      - 3y ago

ajkjk 3y ago

Their comment is about the math, which has to be true. There can still be countervailing effects, but the math still works out the way it works out.

bsdpufferfish 3y ago
its really not. the math is a distant abstraction of a social subject

kbelder 3y ago

Because there is no absence of any positive action. That's one of the main benefits of the free market.

roenxi 3y ago

> Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates. That is the issue with the absurdities of inflation and interest rates - how do you tell whether we're better off if the yardstick for measuring value is being purpose fully distorted? And the way we measure the distortion seems to be unreliable;I don't see how inflation is supposed to rise faster than wages but asset prices seem to be inflating substantially faster than the inflation rate making it harder to save. GDP also disassociated from energy use in the 1970s so I don't see why it going up means I'm better off either - I need cheap energy to be comfortable. All the stuff GDP measures is nice, but rising energy prices are a massive problem that we don't focus on as much as we did when they were driving GDP growth despite the fact that they are still a major part of existing. Asia is better off in real terms. A friend of mine was talking about how he went home to his ancestral village and they had toilets now which is a massive QoL step change. So if "society" is global, yes. If we're talking English speaking countries, you can tell me I'm better off, but I'm not sure what metrics you're using or why we believe they matter. I have access to much better electronic equipment than my parents, and our ability to cure ailments has improved markedly. But a bunch of people I know had to leave the city because they literally couldn't afford to live here. Debt seems to be out of control. We're seeing political discontent in the UK and US that seems to be linked to people who don't believe that they are becoming better off, and I tend to believe people when they say that. TLDR; maybe. But you're making a claim that is vaguer than you might think. We're a much smarter society than we were 50 years ago, but it is less obvious who it is that is "significantly wealthier" and what that means.

jrmg 3y ago
But a bunch of people I know had to leave the city because they literally couldn't afford to live here. Haven’t people always done that though? America’a history is one of constant migration. Searching for general stats on labor mobility, it seems that Americans are moving to find work (surely the same thing as moving because the place they are is unaffordable for the lifestyle they want?) _less_ now: E.g. https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/regional-economics/recent-trends-in-u-s-labor-mobility-not-so-fast https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/regional-economi... In recent decades, as land across the U.S. filled with development—particularly along the coasts—highly mobile cities became increasingly populated by people born there. As an example, in 1960, 20 percent of U.S.-born residents of Los Angeles were from California, while by 2010, 70 percent were. At the same time, population growth rates have converged and are now similar across all regions. Coate and Mangum theorize that these two trends are connected by home attachment, or “rootedness”—that is, people prefer to live near family and social connections.4 Despite individual differences in the intensity of home attachment, the authors find a preference for home among the young and the old, and for both college- and noncollege-educated workers.

harimau777 3y ago

While society has gotten wealthier, have average people, at least in America, gotten wealthier? Technology has advanced so there's things that people can own now that they couldn't before, but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer.

randomdata 3y ago
> but if you look at things that are constant (e.g. housing) then it looks to me like people have gotten poorer. If housing were constant then people would not be any poorer with respect to housing. They would be in the exact same position. But housing is not a constant. The average US house has have more than doubled in size over the past 50 years. The average US home also has one less person living in it as compared to 50 years ago. People today are way richer in housing.
- harimau777 3y ago
  How can people be richer in housing if they can't own a house. That doesn't make sense to me.
  - harryh 3y ago
    Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
    - chipdart 3y ago
      > Homeownership rate over time has moved around within a fairly narrow range. I don't think your graph says what you think it says. The graph shows a time series of the rate of homes which are owner-occupied to those that aren't. When the average Joe buys a house, they tend to stick with it for life. However, the graph you linked clearly shows this rate plummeting from 2004 to 2016, with the nosedive amounting to around 6%. This means that in a short span of a decade, the amount of home owners living in their own home dropped 10%. You have a small spike around 2020 which I bet was caused by WFO allowing people to live in places cheap enough that they could finally afford their home, but that stagnated already. Also, it's interesting how such a meteoric drop happens in an indicator that tracks home ownership, which is something people do for life. You need a very radical change in the people's ability to afford a house to see so many people stop affording them in such a quick timespan.

djtango 3y ago

There was this great chart that I wish I could find which kind of explained it well for me. Things we consume have gotten cheaper - flights, electronics. Things related to wealth - assets but also things like education have all gotten more expensive. So we all get to live a more "experiential" life but good luck passing anything on, if you care about those kinds of things... EDIT here we go - similar (if not the same) chart: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/17/the-stuff-we-really-need-is-getting-more-expensive-other-stuff-is-getting-cheaper/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/17/the-s...

datavirtue 3y ago

And inflation is a result of an increasing money supply, which if it were not the case the poor would be absolutely subjugated.

throwawaymaths 3y ago

People are not getting poorer because productivity has been going up to compensate. As in, we're milking more and more out of the labor and middle classes. (Ok also technology papers over the problem as commerce becomes somewhat more efficient) The family is not too much less wealthy but also we have families with two incomes, breadearners working overtime, stressed out family dynamics, and student going into deeper and deeper debt to be credentialed enough to participate in the sophisticated workforce. If you look at the "wtf happened in 1970" chart, the y axes are productivity and real wages. It turns out 2% inflation is enough to steal the productive increase of labor and middle classes and transfer it to the politically connected, wealthy, and financial sectors. At some point it's just going to be impossible to wring more gains out of labor and technology improvements. We're probably really close.

Aerbil313 3y ago
This was so insightful, thanks.
may_mccheese 3y ago
I don't think we're "really close" insofar as I feel that's been side continuously since the 1600s say. Always another thing comes. People say "everyone is richer" because the cost "nice things" generally drops with time due to efficiency. So nobody is in fact financially richer, just richness from a quality of life perspective versus someone living in a cave - it's kind of a cop-out and a twist on words. Indeed the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1% of the US holds over 95% of the wealth, it's actually completely insane. most people are poor, relatively and comparatively. A common sense wealth / net worth tax, 5% per year for 5 years, 2% per year thereafter, would ameloriate this.

chipdart 3y ago

> But your comment implies that people are getting poorer over time, and it flies in the face of reality, doesn't it? Society has become significantly wealthier, despite the absurdities of inflation and interest rates. I think you are confusing two entirely different things. You can have a society that's getting wealthier and still people getting poorer. In fact, you have just that in the real world. It's as simple as seeing how the median salary and average salary compare and evolve. It's as simple as comparing how minimum wages evolved with inflation. It's no coincidence that even in the US, humanity's apex in economic development and wealth, the average Joe cannot afford a house while a few decades back it could.

rmbyrro 3y ago

Considering how difficult it has become (even pre-COVID) for young people to buy a home, your argument flies in the face of reality, doesn't it?

okr 3y ago
Buy a home where? In the area of a thriving city? Where everyone wants to live?
- carlosjobim 3y ago
  Anywhere. Young people have to move to thriving cities to get better paying jobs and education for better paying jobs, because they cannot afford homes where they were born with the salaries and opportunities there.

okr 3y ago

I can agree with that. It is like the frog in slowly boiling water, just the other way around, people don't realize and appreciate, in what wealth they live and that we all make it constantly better for everyone, consciously or unconsciously. But people look at other people who are visibly better off, compare themselves against those and get tricked into believing, that it is no just. How he can have more? Must be evil! Stolen from the people! Typical divide and conquer, to play with ego and greed, that causes misery and anger among our fellows. It makes me sad to see the same scheme being played out everytime.

carlosjobim 3y ago
If you mean what you say, I'll trade you all my modern conveniences in return for a small patch of land with a house in 1970s standard or 1960s standard. Deal? If offered this, a large majority of young people and people without real estate would gladly accept and happily live without iphones or AC.
- tasuki 3y ago
  I believe that's what they'd say but they actually wouldn't want to do that. Do you know the size of houses in 1960s and how many people lived in how much space? Today people are priced out of the housing market because everyone expects opulent luxury.
  - carlosjobim 3y ago
    No, that's not true. And I don't think you really believe that yourself either. It's just an easy cop out to not have to think about a very serious issue that is crushing your fellow man right now. It is the home sellers who put "opulent luxury" prices on worn down homes in need of repair. It is the sellers who renovate homes for 100 000 to increase the asking price with 500 000. Imagine if this was the market for cars or any other goods.
    - tasuki 3y ago
      I guess it all depends on where/when and other specifics. The reality is that in the fifties large families used to live packed quite tightly in a small space, and now, they... don't?

derangedHorse 3y ago

What do you mean "Society has become significantly wealthier"? When I think of wealth I think of an individual's assets to liabilities. If we look at the total value of an individual's assets with respect to the labor it can purchase, I don't think society has gotten all that wealthier. Maybe you're conflating quality of life with wealth? Better quality and more abundant goods with decreasing marginalized labor costs is what we should expect since technology is naturally deflationary. If anything, the oddity is that food prices ever increase over time when quality is stagnant. The book "The Price of Tomorrow" does a good job giving a perspective on this. There's also the problem of misguided/fraudulent capital investment which is when governments and corporations raise costs under the guise of technological improvements. This is when they say they add in extra processes for quality when they're really just lining their pockets. Think medical schools and doctors (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6288618/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6288618/), the FDA processes(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_Food_and_Drug...), etc.